UCI Points System: Rankings, Licences and Relegation

At the end of the 2022 season, two teams with long histories at the top of road cycling, the Belgian Lotto Soudal squad and Israel-Premier Tech, lost their WorldTour licences. Neither had done anything wrong. They had simply scored fewer UCI points over three seasons than the 18 teams above them, and in a system built on promotion and relegation that was enough.

That is the UCI points system at work. Every race on the international calendar awards points for finishing positions, on a scale set by the race's status: the Tour de France at the top, a small one-day race in Belgium near the bottom. A rider's points feed his place in the individual world ranking, his country's place in the nations ranking and his team's place in the team ranking. The team ranking, added up over a three-year cycle, decides which 18 teams hold WorldTour licences, provided they also pass the UCI's financial and ethical checks. Everything else on this page follows from that.

How the UCI points system works, in one paragraph and one table

Each race on the UCI calendar has a class. The class sets a table of points for the finishing places, and in stage races for stage placings and days spent leading. After the race, the points are allocated to the riders who earned them. Those points count in three rankings at once.

Ranking	Who is ranked	Period counted	What it decides
Individual world ranking	Riders	Rolling 52 weeks	Seeding, prestige, contract value
Nations ranking	National federations	Rolling period set by the regulations	Rider quotas at the World Championships and Olympic Games
Team ranking (season)	Teams	The calendar season	Automatic invitations for the best ProTeams the following year
Team ranking (three-year)	Teams	Three seasons added together	Which teams hold the 18 WorldTour licences

The rider's points belong to him in the individual ranking, and he carries them with him if he changes team. For the team rankings, they stay with the team that employed him when he scored them. That distinction is explained further down, and it is the single most misunderstood detail of the system.

• 18Maximum WorldTeam licences
• 3Seasons in a licence cycle
• 52Weeks in the individual ranking
• 3Grand Tours on the calendar

Structural figures from the UCI regulations as they stood in the mid-2020s. The ranking tables themselves are revised more often.

The points system is easy to describe and hard to live with, because its consequences for teams are severe and its incentives do not always match what fans want from racing. Both of those points are taken up below.

WorldTeams, ProTeams and Continental teams

Men's professional road racing has three tiers of registered team.

UCI WorldTeams are the top tier. They hold a WorldTour licence, which gives them the right, and the obligation, to ride every race on the WorldTour calendar: the Grand Tours, the Monuments and the other top one-day and stage races. They must register a large squad, meet minimum salary obligations for every rider, deposit a bank guarantee and show the financial resources to run a full season across several continents. A WorldTeam also has to field riders in so many races at once that a squad of around thirty is normal.

UCI ProTeams are the second tier. Until 2020 they were called Professional Continental teams. They register each year, with lower minimum requirements than a WorldTeam on roster size and budget, and they also pay their riders a regulated minimum salary. A ProTeam can ride WorldTour races only by invitation, except for the best-ranked ProTeams of the previous season, which receive automatic invitations.

UCI Continental teams are the third tier, registered through their national federation rather than directly with the UCI. They are often semi-professional, with smaller squads, eight riders being the regulated minimum. They race in the Continental circuits: the .1 and .2 classes of race, and the ProSeries by invitation. They cannot ride WorldTour races.

Tier	Registered with	Licence or registration	Can ride WorldTour races
UCI WorldTeam	UCI	Three-year licence cycle	Yes, all of them, as of right
UCI ProTeam	UCI	Annual registration	By invitation; best-ranked receive automatic invitations
UCI Continental team	National federation	Annual registration	No
National team	National federation	Per event	Only at the World Championships and certain events

What each tier pays its riders

The minimum salaries for WorldTeam and ProTeam riders are set through agreements between the riders' association and the teams' association, approved by the UCI, and differ between the two tiers. Continental teams have no comparable minimum. This is why a step from a Continental team to a ProTeam is a life-changing move for a young rider: it is the point at which he becomes a professional with a contract that guarantees a living.

The tier also decides the calendar. A WorldTeam rider might race in Australia in January, Belgium in spring and France in July. A Continental rider in Britain might race the domestic national series, a handful of UCI races in Britain and Belgium, and the Tour of Britain.

How a race's status sets its points scale

Every road race on the UCI calendar has a two-part code. The first digit is the format: 1 for a one-day race, 2 for a stage race. The second part is the level.

• WorldTour races (1.UWT and 2.UWT) are at the top.
• ProSeries races (1.Pro and 2.Pro) are the second level, introduced in 2020.
• Class 1 races (1.1 and 2.1) come next.
• Class 2 races (1.2 and 2.2) are the lowest international level.

National championships, the World Championships and the Olympic road race have their own scales.

Within the WorldTour, the scale is not flat. The Tour de France awards the most points of any race, with the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España a step below. The Monuments — Milan–San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris–Roubaix, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Il Lombardia, explained in our guide to the five Monuments of cycling — come next, then the other WorldTour one-day races and week-long stage races in descending bands.

Stage races score in three ways

In a stage race, points are awarded for three things. The final general classification, scored deep down the order: in a Grand Tour, many dozens of places receive points. Stage placings, scored for the first few on each stage. And days in the leader's jersey, a small daily award for leading the race.

How many UCI points is a Tour de France stage win worth? A fraction of what the overall winner receives, and less than a high general classification finish. The exact figure is printed in the UCI's road regulations and was revised upwards when the scales were reworked for 2023. This page does not reproduce the tables, because the UCI changes them and a stale figure is worse than none. The ratio is what matters: a stage win at the Tour is the most valuable single day in the sport for prestige, but in UCI points it is worth less than a consistent top-ten finish across three weeks.

Lower down the calendar

ProSeries and class 1 and 2 races award proportionately fewer points. A win in a class 2 race is worth a small fraction of a WorldTour win, but class 2 races are many, and a team with a strong rider can win several in a month. That arithmetic is behind the behaviour described in the section on how relegation fights changed racing.

How a team's total is counted, and who owns the points

Here the system becomes specific in a way that shapes how teams are built.

A team's total in a season is not the sum of every point every rider scored. The regulations count the points of a team's leading scorers only, a fixed number of its best riders that season, and drop the rest. The number has been set in the regulations and has been adjusted between cycles, but the principle has been constant: a team is ranked on the depth of its best riders rather than on its whole roster.

Why that rewards depth

A team with one superstar who wins everything and a supporting cast of domestiques will score fewer points than a team with eight or ten riders who each finish in the top ten of races week after week. The superstar's points are capped by the number of races he can ride. The deep team's points are spread across more riders and more races, and more of them count.

That is why teams under threat of relegation have hired riders who score consistently in mid-level races rather than spending the same money on a single Grand Tour contender. A sprinter who wins a dozen class 1 races a year can be worth more in the licence ranking than a climber who finishes sixth in the Tour.

A worked example

Take two invented teams, each with thirty riders, and suppose for illustration that the regulations count each team's best ten scorers in a season.

Team A has one rider who wins a Grand Tour and a string of week-long races, scoring a very large total, and a supporting group of riders who spend the year working for him and score little. Its ten best scorers include the leader's big number and nine small ones.

Team B has no Grand Tour winner. It has a dozen riders who each win or place regularly in one-day races and smaller stage races across the season. Its ten best scorers are all respectable, and none is spectacular.

On paper Team A is the better team, and it will have the more famous season. In the team ranking Team B can finish ahead, because ten solid totals can outweigh one enormous one and nine small ones. The cap on counted riders cuts in both directions: Team B's eleventh and twelfth riders score points that do not count, while Team A's leader cannot ride more races than his body and his programme allow. Real teams sit somewhere between these two shapes, and where a team sits on that spectrum tells you a good deal about how exposed it would be in a relegation fight.

Who owns the points

Points scored by a rider stay with the team that employed him when he scored them. If a rider who scored heavily for one team signs for another, his points remain on the first team's total for the licence ranking. His new team gains nothing until he scores again in its colours.

This rule was a deliberate change from the system of the early 2010s, in which points travelled with the rider and teams were accused of buying riders for their points before licence decisions. Under that system, a team could secure its licence by signing a rider at the end of a season. Under the present one, it cannot.

The rider's individual ranking is different. He keeps his own points there, because that ranking is about him rather than his employer.

The three-year licence cycle: promotion and relegation

The men's WorldTour runs on three-year cycles, the first of which covered 2020 to 2022 and the second 2023 to 2025.

The mechanism is direct. Each season the UCI ranks all WorldTeams and ProTeams together. At the end of the third season, the points for all three seasons are added up. The top 18 in that three-year ranking are entitled to WorldTour licences for the next cycle, provided they apply and meet the other criteria. A ProTeam that finishes in the top 18 is promoted. A WorldTeam that finishes 19th or below is relegated.

1. 1Season oneEvery WorldTeam and ProTeam scores points in the team ranking
2. 2Season twoPoints continue to accumulate; teams near the cut-off start to plan their calendars around points
3. 3Season threeThe final season of the cycle; teams at risk chase points in every race they can enter
4. 4Three-year rankingThe points for all three seasons are added together and the teams ranked
5. 5Cut-off at 18thThe top 18 qualify on sporting grounds; those below do not
6. 6Licence CommissionQualifying teams are assessed on ethical, financial, administrative and organisational criteria
7. 7New cycleLicences are granted for the next three seasons; promoted and relegated teams change tier

The general sequence for the men's three-year cycle. The detailed deadlines and conditions are in the UCI's registration specifications.

The 2022 case

The 2022 season is the clearest example. At the end of the first cycle, Lotto Soudal and Israel-Premier Tech finished outside the top 18 and were relegated to ProTeam status. Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic, ProTeams with strong results, were promoted.

Relegation is not total exile. A relegated team that remains among the best ProTeams can still receive automatic invitations to WorldTour races, including the Grand Tours, as Lotto and Israel did in the seasons that followed. What it loses is the certainty: an invitation earned this year must be earned again next year.

Why three years

A three-year cycle gives teams stability: a licence lasts long enough to sign riders and sponsors for more than one season. It also means one bad year does not end a team's place at the top, provided the other two were good. The cost is that teams in difficulty in the third season fight desperately, and that the two earlier seasons of the cycle are already decided by the time the final relegation fight comes.

The other licence criteria

Finishing in the top 18 gives a team a right to apply. It does not guarantee a licence.

The UCI Licence Commission, an independent body set up under the UCI regulations, assesses every applicant for a WorldTour licence on four sets of criteria.

Ethical criteria cover the team's record on anti-doping and its compliance with the sport's integrity rules. A team whose riders have been involved in repeated anti-doping cases can be refused or suspended.

Financial criteria are the most demanding in practice. The team must show a budget sufficient to run a full season and pay its riders and staff, typically with audited accounts, sponsorship agreements and a bank guarantee covering a portion of salaries in case the team collapses. The guarantee exists because teams have folded mid-season before, leaving riders unpaid.

Administrative criteria cover the paperwork: employment contracts that meet the UCI's minimum terms, registration of riders and staff, insurance, and compliance with reporting requirements.

Organisational criteria cover the team's structure: the staff it employs, including medical staff, its ability to run a racing programme across several continents, and its compliance with rules on rider welfare.

Why a high-ranked team can still be refused

A team that finishes 10th in the three-year ranking but cannot show the money to run a full season, or whose main sponsor has withdrawn, can be refused a licence. What happens to the vacated place is governed by the UCI's rules, but the principle is that the sporting ranking is necessary and not sufficient.

The financial test has become more important as team budgets have grown. A team that ranks well but depends on a single sponsor whose commitment ends during the cycle presents a risk the commission has to weigh.

Wildcards and automatic invitations

A WorldTour race must invite all WorldTeams. In a Grand Tour, that leaves a small number of places for others, and the organiser decides who fills them, subject to the rules.

Automatic invitations

The best-ranked ProTeams of the previous season are entitled to invitations to all WorldTour races in the following year. The number of teams qualifying in this way is set by the regulations and has been changed between cycles, and each qualifying team can choose to accept or decline invitations to individual races. For a relegated team, finishing as one of the leading ProTeams is the way to keep riding the Grand Tours.

The organisers' wildcards

After the automatic invitations, the organisers of WorldTour races have a remaining number of wildcard places to award at their discretion. Organisers use them to invite teams from their own country, which keeps a French team or two at the Tour de France, an Italian team or two at the Giro, and a Spanish team at the Vuelta. Organisers also consider the team's riders, its recent results and its sponsors' links with the race.

The wildcard is the most important decision a ProTeam's year depends on. A team that receives a Tour de France invitation can tell its sponsors their name will be on television for three weeks in July. A team that does not has a very different year. Organisers have refused invitations to teams with strong rankings, which is their right, and it is a reminder that the system mixes sporting merit with the organisers' commercial interests.

The Tour de France time cut and other race rules apply equally to wildcard and licensed teams once they start, but getting to the start is the hard part.

How relegation fights changed racing

The 2022 relegation fight produced a new kind of racing. Teams at risk of relegation sent their best riders to small races they would normally have ignored, because a win in a class 1 race in the middle of the week was worth points the team needed.

What changed in the calendar

A team leader who would have rested between major targets instead raced a small stage race in Croatia or a one-day race in France, where the field was weaker and the points easier to earn. Teams chased places in the top ten of minor races, not just wins, because places scored too. Late in the season, teams that would normally have finished their year early kept racing into October.

The effect on the small races was mixed. Organisers welcomed stronger fields. Continental teams found themselves facing WorldTour riders in races that had been their best chance of a result.

Riders signed for points

Recruitment changed as well. Teams near the cut-off signed riders who had scored consistently, not necessarily the most talented riders on the market. A rider who finished fifth in many races could be more valuable than a rider who won once and was invisible the rest of the year. Riders' agents began to quote points in negotiations.

The criticism

The criticism of the system centres on what it rewards. A rider who gambles on a long breakaway at the Tour de France and loses scores nothing. A rider who sits in and finishes eighth scores well. Critics argue that a points system that rewards consistent placings over wins discourages exactly the attacking racing that makes the sport worth watching. The UCI revised the scales for 2023, partly in response, giving more weight to the biggest races.

The judgement here is that the criticism is fair but overstated. Most racing is still decided by riders trying to win, because wins bring contracts, sponsors and prestige that no points table can replace. The distortion is real in the final season of a cycle, for the handful of teams near the cut-off, and much less elsewhere.

The individual and nations rankings

The individual world ranking covers a rolling 52 weeks: the points a rider scored in the last year, with points from races more than a year ago dropping off as the anniversary passes. The ranking is updated weekly during the season. It replaced the older WorldTour individual ranking, which counted only WorldTour races, and has included every race on the UCI calendar since its introduction in 2016.

The individual ranking has few direct consequences, but it is the measure most cited when a rider's year is discussed, and it plays a part in contract negotiations.

The nations ranking

The nations ranking is the one that matters for national teams. It adds up the points of a country's best riders over a set period, and the UCI uses it to decide how many riders each country may start at the world championships road races and at the Olympic Games.

For the World Championships, the strongest nations are allowed the largest teams, and countries further down the ranking get fewer places or none. For the Olympic road race, the ranking over a qualifying period decides the number of riders each National Olympic Committee may enter.

That matters for Britain in a specific way. At the Olympic Games, Britain competes as Great Britain, under the British Olympic Association. At the World Championships, it competes as Great Britain under British Cycling. England does not have its own team at either event. At the Commonwealth Games, by contrast, England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man compete separately, and the UCI rankings do not apply in the same way. A British rider's points count towards Great Britain's nations ranking, whichever home nation he comes from.

The women's system

The women's WorldTour has a parallel structure with differences of timing and scale.

Women's WorldTeams were introduced in 2020, with licences granted to teams that meet the UCI's criteria, which include minimum salary requirements that were phased in over the early years of the tier and have since moved closer to the men's ProTeam levels. Licence cycles for women's teams have been shorter than the men's three years.

A women's ProTeam tier was added in the mid-2020s, filling the gap between the WorldTeams and the Continental teams, which had made the step up abrupt for teams wanting to move from semi-professional to full professional status.

Women's Continental teams form the base, registered through national federations.

The ranking system works on the same principles: points from races at each level, a rolling individual ranking, a nations ranking used for championship quotas, and a team ranking that feeds into the licensing process.

What the minimum salary does

The minimum salary is the most significant change the women's tier system has brought. Before it, many riders in the top women's teams were paid little or nothing beyond expenses. A WorldTeam licence now requires a team to pay every rider at least the minimum set by the regulations, which has turned the top women's teams into professional employers. It also means fewer teams can afford the top licence, which is the trade-off.

Where British teams and riders sit in the structure

Britain's place in the top tier has rested on one British-registered team with a long history there: the team launched in 2010 as Team Sky and renamed INEOS, later INEOS Grenadiers. The team's history and the Tour de France wins that came from it are covered in the guide to British Tour de France winners.

Below it, the British domestic scene is built around Continental teams registered with British Cycling, which race the national road series, UCI races in Britain and on the continent, and the Tour of Britain when invited.

How a rider in Britain earns UCI points

A British rider's route to UCI points runs through the races that award them. The domestic national series races, organised under British Cycling's regulations, are on the national calendar and do not award UCI points. Riders progress through the domestic categories, explained in our guide to British Cycling race categories, by scoring British Cycling points in those races.

UCI points come from UCI-classified races. In Britain, those include the Tour of Britain, which is a ProSeries race, and a small number of UCI-classified one-day races, of which the Rutland–Melton CiCLE Classic in the East Midlands has been the best known. The national championships also award UCI points to the top finishers. Beyond that, a British rider looking for UCI points usually has to race abroad, in Belgium, France or the Netherlands, where class 1 and 2 races are far more numerous.

1. 1Club and regional racingThe rider earns British Cycling points and moves up through the domestic categories
2. 2National seriesElite-category riders race the British national road series on the national calendar
3. 3UCI races at homeA Continental team gives the rider starts in UCI-classified races in Britain, such as the CiCLE Classic
4. 4Racing abroadThe team or a national squad takes the rider to class 1 and 2 races in Belgium, France and the Netherlands
5. 5Tour of BritainA ProSeries start against WorldTeams, with UCI points and the largest audience of the domestic year
6. 6Step upResults and points earn a contract with a ProTeam or WorldTeam

A typical path rather than a fixed one; many riders go via under-23 teams abroad or through the track programme instead.

That pathway matters because the points a Continental team's riders score also determine the team's own position. For a small British team, a single strong result in a UCI race can be the difference between being invited to bigger races next year and not.

How the system got here: from the ProTour to promotion and relegation

The modern points system is the latest version of a structure the UCI has rebuilt several times in two decades.

Year	Change
2005	UCI ProTour launched: a fixed group of top teams with guaranteed entry to the top races
2008	Grand Tour organisers run their races outside the ProTour in a dispute with the UCI
2011	UCI WorldTour launched, combining the top races into a single calendar
2016	Individual world ranking expanded to include every race on the UCI calendar
2020	Promotion and relegation introduced on a three-year cycle; ProTeams and the ProSeries created
2023	Points scales revised for the second three-year cycle

The ProTour and the dispute

The ProTour of 2005 was the UCI's attempt to create a closed league: a group of licensed teams guaranteed entry to the biggest races. The Grand Tour organisers — ASO, which runs the Tour de France, RCS Sport, which runs the Giro, and the organiser of the Vuelta — objected. They wanted to choose their own fields and did not accept that the UCI could guarantee a team a place in their races.

The dispute ran for several years. In 2008 the three Grand Tours were run outside the ProTour. The two sides reached a settlement that led to the WorldTour of 2011, which combined the top races into one calendar and kept the licensed teams' guarantee, while giving organisers their wildcard places.

Promotion and relegation

The 2020 reform introduced the present structure: a maximum of 18 WorldTeams, a three-year cycle, promotion and relegation on sporting merit, the renaming of Professional Continental teams as ProTeams, and a new ProSeries tier of races. It was the first time the sport's top tier had been decided by a points ranking over a fixed period with a defined cut-off.

The result is a system with clearer rules than before and harsher consequences. A team knows exactly what it has to do to keep its licence. It also knows that failing to do it can cost its place at the races that justify its sponsors' money. For readers following the sport from Britain, that is the context behind every late-season relegation story, and the cycling section carries our wider coverage of how the professional road calendar fits together.